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imaging..

Where did this all begin? In caves? Or was that simply the evolution of useful tools; something to
pin down what was already in our imagination, make it real and tangible; charcoal, and a
surface to put it on.

I'm one of those people who "never goes anywhere without their camera", though sometimes I do, and end up muttering "Damn!", by way of a dispel.

It used to be a bulky affair, OM-2n and paraphernalia, but after my darkroom's dodgy plumbing flooded the downstairs neighbours, twice, I decided to get myself a very basic digital camera and started playing with it, as you do. Really, I haven't looked back since. Yes, I'll likely get a plumber in eventually, because I've never been very good with water-related repairs, but the darkroom facility will end up being for fun and experimentation only, or when I feel masochistic.

Now I desire a 35mm negative scanner, because while I do want to work on some of the mono stuff again, I certainly don't want to spend hours and days on one single image; I'll be working in Paint Shop Pro, or The Gimp, or something, because in truth, I've "gone digital". Things that would take whole weekends now take seconds. Nuff said.

I see the world as compositional space, always have, and I'm continually composing, seeking the hidden truths in ordinary things; a washing pile, some cluttered corner, a dressing-table, objects and their arrangement; the forces of feng shui, a mindful chaos that is story telling, if maybe we are listening. Most things catch my eye at some time, and though I still haven't managed to capture the whole truth, I'm working on it, and I'll share some of that work with you, here.

Where nature and man meet. I'm drawn to decaying buildings, where nature is once again taking over. Walls and doors, fixtures and fittings, like mushrooms, a slowly decaying layer. This marvelous spectacle is becoming rare and as the years pass, and property developers become ever hungrier, there's less and less chance to witness this magical event, man's creations returning to the Earth, a long and quite amazing process involving occupiers, vandals, treasure hunters, tinkers, you name it; and then the forces of nature start to work. Like standing at the edge of big waves, I'm enraptured by this spectacle. I could stand for hours, bathing in it, the minute details of her marvellous work, and sometimes do. I take pictures, too.

It's hard to find a good ruin these days - fresh enough to speak of its former life, yet definitely started the process of returning to the Earth - and I aim to do something about that. You can follow that work here, as I build a permanent exhibit of this amazing process, and how I see it. Along with some of my other photogenic passions, of course.

What else?

I used to do a lot of pencil sketches, there's hundreds kicking around, but looking back I see that
mainly it was a therapy of sorts, and though some beautiful and truly thought-provoking pieces exist there, it's
unlikely many of them will see the light of day, at least in their current form. I drop the odd one into the
archive, for fun, to see what email ensues. I might start dropping them here, though, for similar reasons.

And then there's the experimental stuff. Not that every image isn't experimental in some way; the act of pointing your view at something, even, is an experiment. You just can't know the result until you do it, and then you are a part of it. So it's not a science experiment, then, is it?

Or is it? Probably everything will be, eventually. Now that my old argument about CCD technology being incapable of emulating a real grain pattern - "pixels" are too big - has been made utterly effete - oh, you haven't heard? "they" made a One Hundred Megapixel camera using genetically modified e-coli bacteria. Ilford FP4 on a chip! Hello Twenty-First Century! - I think we can look forward to some interesting times, digitally speaking.